The gig at Sweden Rock Festival (Sweden)

Audience: Somewhere around 3500-4000 in total
Length: 40 minutes

If I said that the last gig at Belsepub was one of the worst I've been to with Beseech then this instead was one of the very best. Three great days with the band and loads of other great music and to top it all of a flawless performance by Beseech...and of course there was one or two beers involved as well.
This will be kind of a different gigreport than you might be used to here at the fanclub, it will be more of a diary from three days on the road with Beseech. So here we go:

Day one, thursday the 10:th of june 2004

Early thursday morning I got picked up in Gothenburg were I live by some of the Beseechers. Me, Erik, Daniel, Jonas and soundengineer Robert took off for what would turn out to be a really awesome weekend. Some of us had managed to convince the others to rent a housewagon to sleep in during the festival (a sign of us getting older?), instead of the tents that by custom is used on festivals.
Well, after about 4½ hours we arrived at the festival area and the confusion began when we tried to find out where we were supposed to park the car and housewagon, this turned out to be easier said than done, but after asking a whole bunch of different people we got help from a very nice security officer who showed us the way to the camping ground. This turned out to be just besides the yaht club close to the area. So I guess you can say that we could have done worse for ourselves. After getting things settled and tasting the first beer it was time to start promoting the gig the following day. At a festival, playing at 1.20 pm isn't the best of times so we thought that it was best to let people know that we were there. Poster, flyers and stickers were handed out and posted over the entire festival area. In close competition with Nightwish and Entombed I think Beseech won the competition of having the most commercial for themselves in the festival area.
We felt rather lucky not having to get in the 1,5 km! long line to get the ticket exchanged for a festivalband, that didn't look like much fun I can tell you. It seems like this festival is growing a bit too fast.

After some mechanical (or something) problems with the staplegun me and Daniel got some serious posting done and the we all felt we deserved a break and took the first walk through the backstage area and found the backstage bar. A bar where we kind of got stuck for a while before we went out to look at the first band of interest for the evening which was danish rockers D.A.D. But playing at the same time was Entombed so we checked out half of each concert. After this we went back to the campsite and sat down with Beseech's producers Christian "Bullen" Silver and Manne Engström to get a nice cup of cold..water? Well in anyway we heard Helloween perform from where we sat so no one felt the need to get up.
Time flies when you're having fun right, so all to soon Judas Priest entered the stage and we all left in a hurry to get in and check out their concert. Judas Priest with good old Mr Halford back again made an impressive gig. This was one of the highpoints at the festival for me personaly. To hear songs like Painkiller sure makes me a happy man anyway.
For some odd reasong we where suddenly back in the backstage bar were Jonas stumbled on to a certain Udo Dirkschneider and of course started talking to the little man. And bought him beer.
Well that about concludes the first day of the festival. Moving on to.....

Day two, friday the 11:th of june 2004

Waking up after sleeping through the night in the car could scare just about anyone, but it wasn't all that bad actually. Our housewagon had room for 5 people sleeping, but there were 7 of us, not a good equation! Well I guess some of you wouldn't mind spendning the night tightly packed with members of Beseech around you but I felt that a little more space was preferable, and so did Erik who joined me in the car.
Well it was a busy morning, all equipment had to get to the stage and the mechandise stand was to be filled up so we had our hands full for a while there.
You could see in most of the members eyes that they were very excited by this gig, they were going to kick some serious butt. Of course some were more tired than others but everything worked out just fine.
A compliment to the orginasation around the stage is sure at hand here, everting worked really smoothly and they just unpacked our car and took everything to the stage.
Now tention was building up and Lotta joined us, she came down on friday. A rather massive rain was coming down unfortunately which would probably mean less people in the audience. But about 30 minutes before the gig the weather cleared up and the rain kept away until a good while after the gig. This of course meant that people started to turn up in numbers.
One of the security people made an estimate that during the gig there were about 1500 people right in front of the stage but all in all with the people around and at the small hill going down to the stage there were about 3500-4000 people there which is I think the biggest audience Beseech has ever had.

It was a thrilling experience to see Beseech enter the stage this afternoon. The big crowd just made them look even more proffesional that they normally do. And the crowd was really doing all that they could to support the band. I've never heard that much singing from the crowd as I did this time. My complements to all of you that were there, you were awesome, thank you!
From the first note of opening Manmade Dreams it was full throttle from Beseech, no mercy was given on this day. Erik and Lotta made their best performance ever and everyone did an awesome job. The slower song Friend Emptiness was lifted out of the set this time due to lack of time and as an adjustment to the more hardcore audience at the festival. It's not easy to lift a song out of this set and Lotta does that song so damned good but I guess I have to agree that it was the best one to lift out anyway.
The as always massive Manmade Dreams sent the crowd crazy and there wasn't many heads infront of the stage not banging.
The sound was really good this time although Robert had some trouble with the wind, but as usual he contributes to the Beseech sound by doing his thing with all of the controls and levers.

After the gig I think both the crowd and Beseech themsleves was very pleased, well I know that the band was and from the comments I heard from the crowd so were they.
This gig also gave Beseech some new fans, since I spent most of the day in the merchandise stand I got to talk to a lot of interesting people who had just discovered Beseech. We sold a lot of albums during the day which is really fun. More Beseech fans to the world!
Later that afternoon Beseech got the chance to get photographed by one of the most well known rock photographers. You can get the idea on what those photos will look like if you chack out the photos below, I took the chance to get some nice photos of Beseech myself at the same time. Looks kind of good don't they?
After this the band went on the the official signing session, they had to wait for Testament to get their butts out of there but then it was time for some Beseech fans to get their autographes.
And for some strange reason we ended up in the bar once again when this was done, strange how things work when you're at a festival.
This day's absolute highpoint was when Monster Magnet went on stage, this was probably the best gig of the festival. From the first song they just kicked ass, this was really great. Other than that we didn't really look at that many bands. Well we saw a very small part of the Scorpions performance, but just face it...these old guys shouldn't be doing music any longer. They really sucked big time.
So I guess you can almost guess where we spent the night :)

Day three, saturday the 12:th of june.

Once again I woke up in the car, but with Mikael besides me instead of Erik. They exchanged places since Erik felt like sleeping in the housewagon this night. Or could it be because of my snoring?
Well we spent most of the day trying to post as many Beseech stickers all around as we possibly could. We had a really good idea when we saw loads of Nightwish stickers all over. Those had lots of white surfaces on them, and ours's is black. Hmmmm wouldn't it be easier to see ours if they had a lighter background? Yes it would, so we used the Nightwish stickers as background which made ours more visable. But don't tell them we did that ok...
Since we were going home early sunday morning some of us had a calm day without that many beers, someone has to drive the car right.

We checked out bands like Kingdom Come, Lost Horizon, Children of Bodom and so on while waiting to check out the Nightwish concert. When we finally got to that the weather gods showed their wrath and sent down a massive rain os us, I don't think I've ever gotten that wet in such a short period of time. Well, at least we got to check out some songs and it was rather good. Even though personaly I get a bit tired of her voice after a while.
Now we only had two bands left that we wanted to see more or less. And while we were waiting for them the idea of going home after the last concert began to form. It would be kind of nice to get home early. So we did actually.
We checked out the massive gig with In Flames which was almost as good as Monster Magnet, but not quite. And then we moved on to at least see a few songs from swedish 80's band Europe. Hey I grew up with these guys on my walls, I had to check them out. But it wasn't that much fun, they just have to realize that they're not 20 anymore. Things that worked when they were that age just doesn't anymore. But it sounded really good although a bit unpersonal, at least to me.

Since that wasn't much fun we decided to leave for home. So we hooked up the housewagon and began the drive for home. I had the luck to be the one driving...luckily I had Erik to keep me company in the front seat. The others fell asleep rather quickly. But all of us got home safely anyway.

So to sum it all up it was a magnificant weekend together with Beseech. Laods of good music and fun people all aorund.
Well, this will have to make do, there will be more efter the next gig.

/Morgan

Playlist:

Manmade Dreams
Souls Highway
Between the lines
Drama
Higher Level
Bitch
Gimme Gimme Gimme

Photos by Martin

Photos by Vesa